GLOBAL BLAKE EVENTS

In Conversation: Spring/Summer Programme, 2025/2026

Below you'll find links to our upcoming Spring series, beginning with Turkish academic Ramazan Saral discussing the work of Blake and Rumi in January.

All events are free. Please use the links below to register.

All times are GMT/BST

13 January, Time: 19.00-20.00 - Wedding with Eternity: Death in the Poetry of Blake and Rumi

Ramazan Saral explores the shared sentiments and mysticism of Blake and Rumi.

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The thirteenth century Persian poet-prophet Rumi is considered a mystic poet, whose company with Shams of Tabriz inspired him to write some of the most sensational poetry of separation, union and longing. The union with the “friend,” in whose reflection one sees God and he himself becomes the reflection of both, is a constant reminder of the maxim of yet another mystic poet from the nineth century, Hallaj: “Ana’l-Haqq” (I am the Truth [or God]). Through this union and separation from the Friend, Rumi’s views on life and death transform and death becomes not a negation or annihilation but a reawakening. Thereafter, he believes “Death is our wedding with eternity.” The same sentiment that death is not an end, but another form of life is ever present in Blake’s poetry. Life of experience is not the only life; therefore, death is not an end to it. Death, Blake believes, is nothing “but removing from one room to another.” The aim of this talk is to compare these two “mystic” poet-prophets in their outlook on life and death and to depict how this outlook deems death as a union with the “Divine.”
Ramazan Saral works as a research assistant in the department of English Language and Literature at Ege University, Türkiye. He recently finished his PhD on Blake and Mythopoeia. He is interested in poetry, British Romanticism, drama and fantasy literature. He also writes his own poetry.

3 February, Time: 19.00-20.00 - Gregory Bateson, William Blake, and Audiovisual Approaches to Blake Scholarship

Jacob Smith examines new ways of considering arguments around authorship, sound and visionary art.

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Jacob Smith will present a selection from his forthcoming book, Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind (University of Michigan Press), which is an online, hyperlinked, multimodal project that provides a new interface with Gregory Bateson’s work and harmonizes it with recent critical frameworks in the environmental humanities. Bateson began his academic career as an anthropologist in the 1930s, collaborated with Margaret Mead on groundbreaking anthropological research utilizing photography and motion pictures, and participated in the founding conferences on cybernetics. After parting ways with Mead, Bateson embarked upon a series of research inquiries that moved across academic disciplines, culminating in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), a book that brought him a new level of public recognition and influence. Bateson was deeply influenced by the work of William Blake, and the talk will present his thoughts on Blake’s adaptation of the Book of Job, the drawing, “The Ghost of a Flea,” and Blake’s comments on perception.
Bateson’s Alphabetis a multimodal/multimedia interactive online book, and the sections on Blake are accompanied by both still and moving images. The second portion of this presentation will talk about the promise of audiovisual approaches to Blake scholarship, taking as an example Jacob's videoessay, “David Lynch Presents William Blake’s “The Sea of Time and Space,” which combines images from Blake’s painting “The Sea of Time and Space” (1821) with sounds created by the film director David Lynch and his collaborators, in order to make an argument about sound, authorship, and visionary art.
Jacob Smith is Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at Northwestern University. He has written several books, most recently Eco-Sonic Media (2015), ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene(2019), and Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves(2021). ESC and Lightning Birds are audiobooks available at the University of Michigan Press website. His forthcoming book is Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind (University of Michigan Press).

3 March, Time: 19.00-20.00 - Mirror Writing and Mirror Designing in William Blake’s Illuminated Books

Camille Adnot examines Blake's use of mirror writing and design

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In 1789, Blake developed the relief etching technique which he described as “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet,” allowing him to simultaneously write and design on copper plates for his illuminated books. This process required Blake to write and design in reverse, leading him to develop his command of retrography. Consequently, what appears “forwards” on the printed page is the product of a “backwards” preparatory process.
There are instances in which Blake intentionally prints text backwards, drawing attention to the transformations of the printed word, as in plates of Milton a Poem (c. 1804-1811) and Jerusalem (c. 1804-1820). This paper analyses the workings of these reversed words on the printed page, examining the dynamics of reading text backwards, and the function that these words serve within the illuminated book. This investigation into mirror writing and its implications extends to Blake’s practice of mirror designing, which, though less obviously subversive and challenging for the reader, still operates a reversal of important proportions. Recurrent iconographic motifs that change orientation depending on whether they are sketched or etched will be approached through W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of “multistable” images (Picture Theory, 1995), leading to a broader discussion on images that suggest a double direction, and pairs of images that mirror each other. Through these analyses, I explore some of the dynamics behind Blake’s fearful symmetries.
Camille Adnot is a Doctor of Université Paris Cité, and a Teaching and Research Fellow at Université Paris-Est Créteil. Her thesis, “‘In midst of Chaos:’ Disorderly Orderings in William Blake’s Illuminated Books,” was supervised by Jean-Marie Fournier, and was defended in 2023. Her research interests include poetry and visual art (18 th -19 th centuries), and the interplay between text and image. She has contributed to collective works such as Water and Sea in Word and Image (Brill, 2023), and Milton Across Borders and Media (OUP, 2023). She co-hosts “Romanticism Across Borders,” a research seminar which fosters a transversal approach to Romanticism.

28 April, Time: 19.00-20.00 -  Imagination and the pregnant mind in Blake’s cosmogony

Annalise Volpone explores Blake's use of partus mentis as a model for the imagination.

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In his early prophetic works, Blake presents his own creation myth, which reinterprets Genesis and critically examines contemporary medical discourse on generation and birth. In this conversation, I would like to explore a specific trope that emerges from Blake’s depiction of imagination and (artistic) creation: partus mentis, the parturition of the mind. This concept serves both as a metaphor for describing imagination and creativity, and as the process through which the Human Form Divine is revealed. Partus mentisoriginates from classical tradition, including mythology and Plato’s philosophy. Traces of this tradition appear in Blake’s own reworking of the metaphor, where he also responds to medical theories and practices regarding generation and life. Through partus mentis, Blake reinforces the analogy between the womb and the brain, which was commonly employed in the medical and literary fields in the long eighteenth century. Finally, Blake’s account of the formation of the human body, which is inseparable from human imagination, poses an ontological challenge. Blake’s embodied imagination blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside, making them increasingly permeable and indistinct.
Annalisa Volpone is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Perugia. She specializes on modernism and romanticism; her research includes the intersections between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. She is currently working on a monograph on birth metaphors and imagination in William Blake.

12 May, Time: 19.00-20.00 -  Rehabilitating the 'Bad' Ancient?: The Life and Times of Frederick Tatham.

Angus Whitehead reconsiders the accusations made against Tatham's preservation of Blake's legacy.

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On scant evidence, a key member of the Ancients, Blake’s later followers, and a key biographer of Blake, Frederick Tatham (1805-78), if known at all in mainstream Blake scholarship, is regarded as the questionable inheritor as well as the fanatical destroyer of important works by the painter, printer and artist. Does this ‘bad press’ and ‘persona non grata’ reputation go some way to explain Blake scholarship’s glossing over Tatham’s life as well as Tatham’s extant works recently discovered not being included in annual round ups of Blake-related discoveries, while the works of fellow Ancients’ such as George Richmond’s and Samuel Palmer’s commonly are? In this paper I will draw upon extensive archival research and other unpublished data to reconstruct and put into focused context an unprecedentedly authentic life of Tatham the man, artist and believer. In the process recently discovered writings - published and unpublished - of Tatham on religion and art will be explored as well as examples of his painting. In conclusion the claim of Tatham’s ‘holocaust’ of Blake’s works will be informedly and dispassionately discussed, throwing these accusations against Tatham into some considerable doubt.
Angus Whitehead is a lecturer in the department of English Language & Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has published widely both on William Blake and South East Asian literature. His recent publications include ‘“My Fingers Emit Sparks of Fire”: William Blake, Letter Writer’ in William Blake's Manuscripts ed Mark Crosby & Josephine McQuail, and (with Catherine Kelly) William Blake's Last Surviving London Residence in Vala.

2 June, Time: 19.00-20.00 -  Blake’s Beast: Reading “The Everlasting Gospel” with Nietzsche’s The Antichrist

Matthew Leporatti explores some of the tensions and similarities between Blake and Nietzsche

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Walter Kaufmann’s acclaimed biography of Friedrich Nietzsche opens its chapter on power with an epigraph from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the famous “Voice of the Devil” that extols “Energy.” Kaufmann was neither the first nor the last to observe a curious synergy between the writings of Nietzsche and Blake, thinkers whom many readers might be tempted to regard as diametrically opposed. But studies such as Harvey Birenbaum’s Between Nietzsche and Blake have demonstrated that the similarities are intriguing.
Yet the relays between Blakean and Nietzschean thought are understudied. In this presentation, I focus on two works that bring the similarities and differences between these thinkers into sharp relief: Blake’s “Everlasting Gospel” and Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. Both texts present unique visions of Christ, and both ultimately argue, in different ways, that the historical Jesus was twisted by the Church into a contrary image. Nietzsche’s title, then, describes both himself, as an opponent of conventional Christianity, and also the “real Jesus” at the heart of the Gospel myth, a different sort of opponent of the religion that would bear his name. Blake’s “Everlasting Gospel” also seeks to recover a “real Jesus” who is opposed to the message of the “false Christ” promoted by conventional Christianity. But where Nietzsche considers the real Jesus a passive introvert who preaches resignation from life, Blake finds in the real Jesus a prototype of the passionate artist: one who embraces Energy and life, a self-overcomer who perhaps has more in common with Nietzsche’s “overman” than critics might suppose.
Matthew Leporati is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. He is the author of Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2023), and his essays and reviews have appeared in Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism, Modern Language Studies, European Romantic Review, and other journals. His current research project concerns William Blake’s response to epic tradition, and he runs a blog on James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake  (www.TheSuspendedSentence.com).

For recordings of previous events, please visit the link to Global Blake in Conversation.